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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

35mm intercut with RED footage

jimhare said:
You said the mistake was to not use a light meter with the RED. Was it too tempting to rely on the histogram etc?

So if you could do it again, how would you approach the shoot?

Great job, thanks for posting!

Jim
Sydney Australia
Click to expand...

In future, would do some tests in terms of rating the camera at 320, and comparing the histogram vs light meter reading. the dop did do a very quick test and found that RED rated at 320 was more like 250. Also i would certainly pull focus with measurement.
I think we should have been more careful with highlighted buildings and clothes, again making better light reading.

I still feel the results would have been much better if Technicolor did the CC on red footage, it was simply a mater of not having the money. I'll speak to the guys and possibly send a shot that's used in the video and ask him for a favour.
 
Is this about right? I hope I'm wrong and that it is not that easy to tell from a Vimeo compressed version. However, as you mentioned, the Red Footage could have been markedly improved by proper exposures and equivalent Post. Perhaps also the gear used for shooting film was higher quality, fluid head, steadicam?

Number represents shots/cuts in order from beginning.

1 - Film
2 - Red
3 - Film
4 - Red
5 - Film
6 - Film
7 - Red
8 - Film
9 - Film
10 - Film
11 - Film
12 - Film
13 - Red
14 - Red
15 - Red
16 - Red
17 - Red
18 - Film
19 - Film
20 - Film
 
NormLi said:
Hey Bal! Glad your shoot turned out well :)
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Hey Norm thanks for all the help. hopefully i should get my RED in the next few weeks or so :shifty: :shifty: :shifty:
 
I think some of the comments are being a little kind to the RED shots. To me the difference is pretty big, with the film shots much clearer, less noise etc., no contest. If some of you experienced RED guys feel that a lot of this is down to first use and less than ideal post then fine, I believe you, and if you say it can be made to match really well then I don't doubt you. But quite clearly it's a well short of the mark here. And I think this is the challenge facing a lot of prospective RED shooters at the moment (and particularly people commissioning shoots), that the shooting and post are pretty different to traditional methods and that to get something on screen is fairly simple, but to get close to the best from the camera requires a fair bit of knowledge (and for those new to it also potentially expensive time).
Thanks for posting the clip, always intersting to see comparisons.
Steve
 
The difference between the film and red was quite obvious to me (I think). The shots in the park around the benches with the orange flowers in the background clipped on the highlights. There for the shots lost a lot of detail in the sky. The white jacket shot was so over that it looked like it was done on purpose as an effect almost not sure that was the intention though. There were others as well can't remember them all but these really stood out.
My question is whether the seemingly smaller DR was a matter of "knowing the camera" or was it a matter of post work flow. By this I mean would it have been correct exposing to the faces and the sky on the shoot that would have retained the now lost detail? Or was it a pre-debayring or first light cc in possibly redcine that would have helped to bring down some of the highlights, and prevent loosing all that detail in the skies?

Nice looking 35mm though very good job on that, thanks for posting the side by side.
 
Concrete said:
Exposing and developing correctly, that's how.

Or do you really believe that these simple scenes couldn't be exposed so that the t-shirt wasn't overexposed?
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Are you being facetious? Do you actually use a Red in production? I imagine if you exposed to contain the white jacket or the skies in the on the straight line portion of the exposure curve then the rest of the scene would be unrecoverably dark. Thats what I believe.
 
I've shot with a RED and have developed several R3D's with REDcine and systematically this blown out whites come from a bad developing.

It remembers me of one of the first R3D's published: the one with guy with a white t-shirt and a girl lighted by a sun ray.

The first jpg's showed a completely overxposed t-shirt. After playing with it, all the detail was recovered.

Nice site, BTW.

PS: Here it is
hdr.jpg
 
Thx. I find that in anything but direct frontal sunlight (for example backlight or sidelight) that white shirts become unrecoverable and to try to expose within the liimits pushes the shadow detail of the scene to below recoverable levels - this is not wholly related to RED by the way - all imaging uptake systems have limits. The answer I find is to "tech" shirts etc down using blue or grey dye or soaking in tea (as we used to when shooting film ten years ago) - costume people (particularly the younger newer ones) don't seem to grasp that this is part of their jobs.

if you look carefully at Zodiac (a beautifully shot film IMHO) you can see that occassionally white shirts are clipping in the newsroom and meeting room.

EDIT : Alternatively an 18k blasted at the talent to reduce highlight to shadow ratio also helps.
 
I think everyone is being too critical here. THIS WAS OUR FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH RED, AS I HAVE MENTIONED, WE DID THINGS WE SHOULD NOT HAVE.
Also color correction is a major part of RED workflow. This is were the image is treated for it's final assessment, and simply we have not done justice at this stage.
 
Hey Streetlife.
None of these posts were jabs at you. We all greatly appreciate your post and understand the conditions under which the project was shot and post processed. We are just trying to analyze the work flow and the quality comparison to the bench mark of image looks, 35mm.
To that matter I think most people here are trying to learn from your experience so we don't loose detail in our highlights. Obviously a combination of correct exposure to a set ASA and good post cc is needed but which had more of an effect in this particular case. I would like to think that in light of the posted footage the raw data contains enough information to be able to cc the detail back into the image despite the overexposure. Would be interesting to see one of the clipped sky shots properly cc to test whether the detail is redeemable. Since there were no meter readings taken we couldn't make more than an educated guess as to the possibilities of stretching the latitude with red to the max with this experiment.
 
coldpizza said:
Hey Streetlife.
None of these posts were jabs at you. We all greatly appreciate your post and understand the conditions under which the project was shot and post processed. We are just trying to analyze the work flow and the quality comparison to the bench mark of image looks, 35mm.
To that matter I think most people here are trying to learn from your experience so we don't loose detail in our highlights. Obviously a combination of correct exposure to a set ASA and good post cc is needed but which had more of an effect in this particular case. I would like to think that in light of the posted footage the raw data contains enough information to be able to cc the detail back into the image despite the overexposure. Would be interesting to see one of the clipped sky shots properly cc to test whether the detail is redeemable. Since there were no meter readings taken we couldn't make more than an educated guess as to the possibilities of stretching the latitude with red to the max with this experiment.
Click to expand...

i'm sending all the shots of red to be graded by an experienced CC, and will post the new footage as soon as i get it back, possible i'll just cut the new footage to the current edit.

I never thought for one min that anyone is taking any jabs. i'm more defensive of the RED footage than anyone else. We are in middle of feature - super 35mm using the cooke prime. The next feature will be RED with cooke lenses.
 
Please correct me if I am wrong. I am thinking that finishing with Color with ProRes 10 Bit at 2K has a lot to do with it versus finishing on something like Scratch where you apply the CC to the native R3D. I am sure the images would have looked far better. No offense Streetlife, you did do an excellent job with limited experience and tools.
 
I agree that the difference is pretty big. To me it's as much the motion of the image as anything else. I'm not sure what it is, but the Red footage moves more like video in this to my eye.
 
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